I guess you could put me in the “concerned” category on the various — and disputed — accounts of how the government data mines phone records and obtains email and search information from internet companies.

On the one hand, I’m concerned about those who have bad intent towards the country. These people and governments exist, and the electronic tools used by the U.S. government undoubtedly could keep us safer than we would be without such measures. How much safer is unknown.

But I’m also concerned with what could be done with the information gathered about American citizens not suspected of a crime if put into the hands of politicians and political groups, and bureaucrats who work for or are sympathetic to such politicians and political groups.

The threat, oddly enough, is proven by the leaks which (allegedly) exposed the programs and were provided to Glenn Greenwald. If some government employee who has sworn to keep information secret is willing to leak the information to Glenn Greenwald for (allegedly) good purposes, what’s to stop that person from violating his or her oath by leaking data-mined information to Glenn Greenwald or Media Matters or the Human Rights Campaign for other than good reasons about a Tea Party group, religious figure or conservative politician?

In the age of Obama and the unique mainstream media disinterest in anything that damages Obama, this already has resulted in a flourishing culture of intimidation directed at the Tea Party, traditional marriage supporters, conservatives, and other opponents of Obama and the Obama agenda.

Prosecutors have become kings, with the ability to find a crime committed by just about anyone. Data mining and access to internet activity can help find terrorists, but it also can be used to find crimes which were not previously known to have been committed by political opponents.

A “find the target first, then find the crime” political approach requires access to information of an unprecedented level. Which is exactly what is happening.

The issue goes beyond the NSA programs. Obamacare is a form of data mining.

Obamacare will put into the hands of the IRS medical and health information of an unprecedented level. As bad as leaks as to which websites you visit would be, the threat of leakage of your medical information could be equally devastating to freedom of speech and the political process. It would take a mere nod and a wink to convince someone that participation in the political process was not worth it if the result was the exposure of sensitive medical issues.

You can’t separate the data mining, the culture of intimidation, and criminalization of daily life.

The answer to this problem is not easy, precisely because of the legitimate national security concerns. That where to draw the line may be difficult to ascertain does not mean that a line should not be drawn. The wholesale creation of a national database of everything electronic crosses any reasonable line.

Obama’s response is that we should trust the government.

The Obama scandals tell us otherwise. From the phony Benghazi talking points, to IRS targeting, to deceptive measures to obtain journalist phone and email records, the Obama administration at multiple levels and in multiple agencies has proven that it is not worthy of our trust. Or of our information.

Yes, encryption can be cracked, but it takes an enormous amount of time to do compared to scanning unencrypted email flowing by. And the resources they can devote to decryption are not infinite and must be allocated by organizational priorities.

Although the news is that the NSA is scanning your email, the physical limitations of the net itself impose great limits on that activity, or else people who work in carrier hotels and network facilities would commonly tell stories about how much duplicate equipment and network capacity is being consumed by this outrageous general warrant to eavesdrop.

Unless you come to their attention in a way that boosts your score up high enough the things you encrypt will stay private.

Of course if you’re really paranoid, you wonder whether the NSA has a back door into Enigmail and PGP. I mean they made an offer that fifty (or more) U.S. tech companies couldn’t refuse, so why not Enigmail?

Government data mining, like the TSA and all the other outrages of the “war on terror”, have one connection to real terrorists and one only. Namely, getting them imposed on us is the terrorists’ way of carrying out a “denial-of-freedom attack.”

Finally, someone is pointing this out (aside from mercurial leftist Camille Paglia, who deliciously called Obamacare “Stalinist” in its privacy abuses). Thank you. I’ve been saying this for four years. Obamacare is primarily a sanctified and covert data mining operation, the largest in US history. The healthcare bit is the pretext.

All this data mining didn’t help stop the Boston bombers, did it? Even with the assistance of intelligence from other countries. Even if they are using it for what they say, they clearly fail at it.

But on the other side–anyone who thinks there is a modicum of privacy outside your own front door these days is fooling themselves. Cameras everywhere, and all electronic communication has the ability to be tracked whether it currently is or not. This was a good reminder.

To give you an example of the agency’s priorities, according to their own manual, they are searching for what are called IOIs (Items Of Interest), which include (naturally) any and all criticism of the DHS!

1.2 Critical Information Requirements

The attribution of IOIs by CIR allows the MMC to catalog articles into five specific categories dependingon the potential impact or type of article that is being distributed. These CIRs include:

Linked twice! Well said PJ! Rush, Mark Steyn, TOM, Instapundit, Gay Patriot, IowaHawk (and of course you) are leading the charge. We have to keep pursuing this because it is a very big deal. This is not some esoteric libertarian concept, this is rule of law in a Democratic Republic. We ignore the real threat over stupid politically correct sensibilities and instead go the other way with broad civil liberty intrusions for all our citizens.

The Obama administration has identified its real enemies: US citizens exercising their Free Speech rights. Muslim mass-bombers aren’t a threat – after all, Obama has killed far more people with drones than the Boston bombers dreamed of killing.

But Free Speech and people disagreeing with him – THAT has to be stopped.

Orwell’s “1984” described an Obamian state where everyone was monitored all the time, and people were executed for the smallest crime, chief of which was thinking the government might be lying.

FACE IT: OBOZO is mining data on his political opponents to use against them (like he did via the IRS) and is doing NOTHING to track down terrorists (like the Boston bombers). Instead of making America safer, his unconstitutional programs are further creating a no-freedom, authoritarian police state dictatorship.

Even the leftist propaganda sheet The New York Slimes says: OBOZO has LOST ALL CREDIBILITY (like he had ANY to begin with ! )

NB: From my experience, you’ll have an FBI SWAT team at your front door within 30 minutes of sending out your first e-mail with the above. The team will include a representative from holder’s Dept of InJustice, who will serve you with papers stating that you have committed the crime of behaving like an American Citizen, which the OBOZO regime considers a FELONY, punishable by DEATH from the OBOZOCARE DEATH PANEL.

You’re raising an interesting point. The ‘data mining’ techniques being employed by the government are based on various ‘pattern recognition’ algorithms, network analysis and other data mining and machine learning approaches.

It might be possible to confound the algorithms if huge volumes of ‘noise’ is introduced into the system, forcing the algorithms to generate too many ‘false positives’. Unfortunately, each of these false positives might results in a government shakedown of the ‘offending’ individual.

If we downsize the federal government so there are fewer areas of society and life that federal politicians and government bureaucrats have control of, then there would be less incentive for them to want to gather up info on citizens to use against them.

Ideally, we should shrink the federal government back to the scope under which it operated before the New Deal. Figure out a way to transition back to enforcing the limits built into the U.S. Constitution: the 10th Amendment, the Interstate Commerce Clause, and the proper interpretation of the General Welfare Clause and its citing of the power to tax. (Madison said it was crazy not to assume that power to tax referred only to raising taxes for federal activities that were explicitly enumerated in the rest of the Constitution.)

Practically speaking, the big intrusive federal programs are all so badly run that is an excellent reason by itself to privatize them or turn them over to the 50 states to run or abolish as they see fit. There is also a very strong moral argument one can legitimately make: they’ve done a lot of harm to certain segments of society heavily impacted by them.

Then, when the feds are reduced to mostly providing for national defense, controlling our borders, international relations, then spying on American citizens should be primarily related to our defense from foreign and domestic enemies who would do us substantial harm. It would NOT be because we oppose ObamaCare, want to privatize Social Security, or thought the trillion dollars per year we spend on welfare-type programs is too much. The feds wouldn’t HAVE any such programs – and NO incentive to “punish,” say, Tea Party types who want to downsize government. (Hm. Are we in a huge, very big battle here, folks? Is this NSA spying thing going to help or hurt us in this greater objective?)

Oh, yeah, the IRS deciding to thoroughly question conservative organizations who apply for tax exempt status under public law 501(c) provisions (mostly 3, 4, and 5). The SCOTUS should declare all of those restrictions on federal election campaign funding as unconstitutional. Now, that would eliminate the need for the FEC and the byzantine rules for how much a citizen can give to a candidate each election cycle, but does not address the ability to give to a 501(c)(3) organization which allows the donor to declare his gift as tax exempt for his 1040 return. But, with such a huge reduction in the size of the federal government, they’d need much less in the way of taxes. You could probably reduce the income tax top bracket to 15% – make it a flat tax. Eliminate all tax deductions to simplify it. Then you wouldn’t need the tax deductible business anyway.

Okay, you’d have to grandfather in the existing federal middle class entitlement programs and have young people entering the workforce at 18 or 22 have private IRA’s for retirement and old age health costs. That would mean the scope of the federal expenditures would go down slowly over 50 years or so.

What Chile did when they privatized their Social Security system in 1980 was they gave the workers a choice to draw out their payroll tax contributions in a lump sum or continue to stay in the government system. They did not get the money in cash, rather in a government Treasury Bond that they could NOT redeem until they reached retirement age (65, I believe). That way the feds were not flooded with huge needs to pay out oodles of cash and see lots of people go on a spending binge. The typical worker withdrew his payroll tax if he were under 45 years old or so. Those over 45 stayed in. So that meant the Phase Out period for their middle class entitlements was a lot shorter than you might have expected. And Chile dictated that if you withdrew, you HAD to put 10% of your income into your private IRA every year and couldn’t spend it until you retired at 65. That resulted in lots of funds to invest in private industry. Their economy grew faster as a result.

Folks, the government has been collecting data on Americans since the late sixties. It’s just with the advent of computers with gigantic storage and computing power that all this data(origin, education, financial, medical, political, and religious)can be analyzed and a specific profile constructed for each and every American. The real problem with this information is that eventually someone will try to sell it to make a buck or for ideological reasons give it to an unfriendly group or government.

on the egregiousness scale, I find ‘somebody trying to make a buck’ many orders of magnitude less disturbing than some jackbooted/jacklegged bureaucrat targeting me because I don’t believe he/she should be in a government employee union that is locked in a 69 maneuver with the democratic party, draining my assets and income to fuel their little love fest. Caveat Emptor is a concept I’m quite comfortable with… but when the feds decide they can shake me down, what is my recourse?

Remember DHS has identified who it believes are terrorists… that would be Christians, 2nd Amendment Supports, State’s Rights and limited government folks, veterans, disgruntled taxpayers and so forth.

But beyond that, you have a President who already used a similar type of data mining operation to target individual voters with personal messages to sway their votes and apps that provided campaign workers with detailed information and voting histories on entire neighborhoods.

[…] This NSA scandal is like the national gun registry we continue to hear derided as a “conspiracy theory”. In this case however we are all in the registry for crimes to be determined in the future. […]

Here is a question worth pondering: If our government is so intent on “protecting” Americans against our enemies (which it refuses to name) that it knowingly goes to the extreme of trampling our 4th Amendment protections, then why has it obliged Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated groups’ demand to “purge” our military, intelligence, and LEO agencies of training material “biased” toward Islam, specifically Jihad? And why has our government, bowing further to those demands, purged trainers such as Stephen Coughlin — an expert in Islamic doctrine — whose job was to brief, Sun Tzu-style, the aforementioned security community in the detection of Jihadis?

For example: “What is being overlooked? The US government is saying we need to fish from a pool of 300 million Americans to find and pre-empt the next “terrorist” — or else. It is saying that we need to do this because there are no other predicters of “terrorism.” It is saying that there are no doctrinal predicters of “terrorism.” It is lying. It is lying about “terrorism” itself.

“William Binney, whistleblower and former NSA crypto-mathematician who served in the agency for decades, said the David Petraeus sex scandal was most likely exposed using illegal surveillance of his email.

Perhaps this helps explain why the CIA Director, who surely knew the truth about Benghazi from the get-go, allowed all those changes to the CIA talking points (scrubbing references to Islamic terrorism, scrubbing prior attacks), then briefed the press off the record that “we really think the video had something to do with it.”

The question is – do the American people have it in them to do something about it?

I am very uncomfortable with an administration that considers its political opponents as the enemy. They have already shown that they are more than willing to take illegal measures against Conservatives and religious groups and more than one government department is being trained to think of those on the Right as high risk potential terrorists.
Today we read of military officers being penalized for reading the wrong books or authors (Conservatives). Homeland Security has amassed a domestic army and enough ammunition to shoot every citizen multiple times.
Since Obama became President even the focus of our military research has totally changed from developing large mass destruction weapon systems used to fight armies of nation states to weapon systems that find, track and kill individuals.

I wondered why Obama, who appears to feel he can’t do enough to appease Moslem nations, was at the same time robustly using this technology (drones, etcetera) in Pakistan and Afghanistan even against American citizens, civilians, and children. I now fear that it was the ideal place to avoid to much domestic criticism as he field tested these weapons and trained troops in their use before he turns them against his real enemies (Conservatives) at home.

I realize I am making a giant leap here, but you tell me, do you trust this Administration and what have they already demonstrated they are capable of?

All this talk about keeping us safe with all this data mining is in direct opposition with obama’s policy of letting every Tom, Dick and Harry all over the world invade our borders and even when law enforcement catches them, they have to let them go even people with duis and felonies. He pays absolutely no attention to the drug cartels in our stats.

Does this wonderful infringsment of our liberty also keep track of these illegals? Actually, no. It couldn’t even keep track of the e-mails and phone calls from Nidal Hason to Alawahi. You would think with this advanced technology NSA would have known every person Alawhi talked to. I firmly believe this is a tool to destroy their enemies (us)or (US wich is also us). Here they have or will have access to our medical records, charge accounts, phone calls, smart electricity meters and remember Google and those drones can see inside your house so the government can keep up with how many times you have sex and give you drugs to enhance or deter your sex drive.

I’m beginning to wonder whether we should scrap the one man presidency and have three instead to keep one man’s ego from rnning amok. Or at least take away the justice department from him so there would be some recourse to his tyranny.

My friend spent some time in intel. I was partnered up with him when we started our intel unit in our department. He is MENSA bright and thinks outside the box. His thoughts are important. He explained his concerns about the sweep saying it is just too broad to be effective. The better way is to sweep outside in, like tracking calls FROM Yemen to the US rather than seek all records of all citizens from the US and go the other way which is inefficient. He considers this “lazy cop” policing.

Further he figured out what the NSA is doing by creating lock boxes that the companies dump their FISA warrant data into. His concerns are that we are allowing other nations to piggyback on our secure servers with their version of FISA warrants, and we might be “sniffing” their data.

But his out of the box thoughts are this: the NSA metadata sweep is a violation of the right to assemble for religious reasons. DHS thinks Christians are dangerous. They can track your phone to where you go on Sunday morning and then see every phone around you- your fellow worshipers. Then they can spider web out from there. If you are a Jew, think about that for a second. As Beck pointed out, if Hitler had that capability no Jew would have survived.

You have potential damping on the right to assemble and the right to worship and in return for what? Tracking 300 million to catch 300 is not worth it. Unless you are a government lawyer or maybe want to intimidate.